> on about 1,900,000 immigrants, over 85% are Europeans, 300,000 are Italians, 295,000 are Germans and 110,000 are French, which are not really immigrants in the real sense being official languages in Switzerland
Who ever said that immigrants don't count as immigrants if they already speak the national language?
My mother's family immigrated from the UK to Australia when she was a child. They all spoke English as a native language. That fact didn't make them any less "immigrants". Back then (early 1950s), the vast majority of immigrants to Australia were native English speakers and had always been (back to the very start of European colonisation). It was only in the subsequent decades that immigration to Australia diversified and native English-speakers became a successively smaller percentage of all immigrants. But even today, the number one country of birth for foreign-born Australians remains England; China and India are in the second and third spots, respectively; New Zealand fourth. (Australian immigration statistics treat the four constituent countries of the UK separately.)
Full disclosure, my uncle went to live in Switzerland in the 70s because Canton Ticino is Italian, people living there were and still are Italian and they chose to have Italian as official language, because it was their language.
Italy and Canton Ticino share a common border and speak the same language.
Same thing on the French side, a little less on the German one.
UK and Australia aren't even on the same side of the planet!
Whereas the border between Italy and Switzerland if you pass with an Italian plate or document is virtually non existent.
I used to go skiing in Livigno and it is faster to got through Switzerland, most of the times they didn't even stop us.
They saw the vignette on the windshield and didn't even bother to go out in the cold to check.
I don't consider a French person in Italy an immigrant, but a fellow European.
Switzerland is basically part of the EU without the Euro.
They adhered to the free trade market in 1972, entered EFTA in 1992, they are part of Schengen since 2008, EU is the largest trading partner for Switzerland importing ~50 billions of goods and services, accounting for ~7% of Swiss GDP, why in the hell some Swiss think that Europeans (especially those coming from bordering countries) are immigrants is incomprehensible to me...
I think maybe the issue is that the word "immigrant" means informally different things to different people, and something else again officially.
A person from country A who voluntarily moves to country B with the intention of staying there permanently is officially an "immigrant". That's the international standard definition used in immigration statistics, so we can compare immigration statistics between different countries. As far as the official definition goes, it doesn't matter whether the source and destination countries have a common border or are on other sides of the planet, whether they speak the same language or not, whether they are culturally alike or culturally dissimilar.
Now if you are talking about what "immigrant" means informally, that's something which varies in different countries. In Australia, you get anti-immigrant sentiment, and a lot of Australians respond to that anti-immigrant sentiment by saying "we are all immigrants! (except for the Indigenous)". In Europe, I think the term "immigrant" has a more negative connotation. That method of "reclaiming" it doesn't work if your ancestors have lived in the same place so long that nobody is really sure when they immigrated to it, but whenever it was, it was likely thousands of year ago. Hence the term tends to be associated more with immigrants from poorer countries, whereas immigrants from richer countries don't want to be called that, and others don't want to call them that, even if that's technically what they are.
> Switzerland is basically part of the EU without the Euro.
Well, Denmark and Sweden are officially part of the EU without the Euro. Switzerland is not officially part of either the EU or the EEA. Although a messy system of piecemeal bilateral deals makes it a quasi-member of the EEA.
> why in the hell some Swiss think that Europeans (especially those coming from bordering countries) are immigrants is incomprehensible to me...
Because by the formal official definition of the term they are, even if by many people's informal definitions they are not.
Who ever said that immigrants don't count as immigrants if they already speak the national language?
My mother's family immigrated from the UK to Australia when she was a child. They all spoke English as a native language. That fact didn't make them any less "immigrants". Back then (early 1950s), the vast majority of immigrants to Australia were native English speakers and had always been (back to the very start of European colonisation). It was only in the subsequent decades that immigration to Australia diversified and native English-speakers became a successively smaller percentage of all immigrants. But even today, the number one country of birth for foreign-born Australians remains England; China and India are in the second and third spots, respectively; New Zealand fourth. (Australian immigration statistics treat the four constituent countries of the UK separately.)
https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/lookup/3412.0Media%...